On Bilingual Education For Elementary And Secondary Students

The implementation of bilingual education and its effectiveness reveal not only individual accomplishments but also overall competitiveness of a country. With worldwide theoretic research and current bilingual practices, it has been shown that English teaching reforming, which is now underway and is characterized with bilingual education, serves as the solution to the improvement of English teaching in China, where great investment in English teaching does not match with the following little effectiveness. At least ten years is spent on learning English for any ordinary school student in China,altogether in his primary, secondary and collegial schools. However, in China it is much common for a school graduate to be qualified in his major with poor command of English, who can neither converse with nor understand a native English speaker. It is obvious that what a school graduate has learned about English at school is of little help for his future career. This popular phenomenon has seriously affected realization of the overall educational objectives and improvement of the overall educational effectiveness, and has consistently restrained education reforming for individual accomplishments. Thus, it is urgent to do research on practical modes of bilingual education and strategies for implementing bilingual education for elementary and secondary students.Firstly in this paper, the author analyzes four groups of concepts relating bilingual education, and provides psychological and educational theories supporting feasibility of bilingual education in China.Secondly, based on the current bilingual practices in China, the author has conducted profound and systematic analysis into five illusions about bilingual education and seven reasons for the illusions so as to clarify the fact that the sticking point for bilingual education lies in the deviation from correct objectives of bilingual education, reasonable modes of bilingual education, competent bilingual teachers and feasible bilingual textbooks, comprehensive evaluation mechanism, and bilingual immersion...